Re-imagining the laws of nature

This event is presented by the Australian Centre for Climate and Environmental Law at the University of Sydney Law School in partnership with the Sydney Environment Institute.

Maria Ojala defines hope to include ‘active coping in the face of hardship’. With the very real hardship of global extinction, I argue that form is as important as content when exploring active coping amidst planetary scale social-ecological upheaval. I contend further, that blurring the lines of form and content enables plural worldviews and understandings of natural worlds.

The sheer existence of our more-than-human kin is disappearing on our watch. The IPBES Values Assessment attributes this unprecedented global biodiversity loss to the prioritisation of instrumental values. In other words, dominant worldviews, which emphasise nature’s use and its usefulness to humans, are a fundamental underlying driver of the catastrophic loss of nature.  Creative forms of expression present an important means of engaging emotionally with nature’s intrinsic and relational values. Dominant legal systems, however, largely reflect and entrench dominant value systems which foreground the instrumental values of nature. Current laws mostly focus on safeguarding individual rights and property - and by extension the values of nature that can be easily traded in markets. 

I contemplate what it would mean to rewrite legal systems with the more-than-human. I consider how storying with nature may allow the re-imagination of law – and of dominant, destructive ways of understanding nature. I argue that creative writing, as a methodology in legal scholarship (and other disciplines), could contribute to the realisation of radically hopeful futures and the normalisation of human-nature relations.

Speakers

Dr Michelle Lim is an Associate Professor of Law  and a Lee Kong Chian Fellow at the Yong Pung How School of Law, Singapore Management University, Singapore. Michelle’s work focuses on futures-oriented biodiversity law aimed at advancing equity and sustainability under conditions of unprecedented environmental change. She is increasingly interested in approaches which allows affective engagement with scholarship and explores ways which challenge the form of scholarship including through creative and imaginative means of expression (e.g. speculative fiction, poetry).

Michelle is Deputy Editor of the Review of European, Comparative and International Environmental Law and Deputy Chair of the Biodiversity Law Specialist Group of the IUCN World Commission on Environmental Law. She was a Fellow of the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) and an author of the IPBES-IPCC Co-sponsored Workshop Report on Biodiversity and Climate Change."